Life On Air, developers of Meerkat, pull the app from the App Store to focus on group video chat app Houseparty
Remember Meerkat? It came out of nowhere in early 2015 — a star of SXSW, in particular — and was on everyone's tongue for weeks. Then came Periscope …
Context & Ripple Effects
This is the end of a two-year retreat. Meerkat was the breakout of SXSW 2015, but within a year its usage had collapsed under competition from Periscope, weak stream recommendations, and losing its App Store featuring. By March 2016 the company was already ditching the livestream for a video social network, and it had stealth-launched Houseparty in February.
Pulling Meerkat from the App Store makes the pivot official: Life On Air is no longer running two products, it is a group-video-chat company. The bet pays off quickly — by December the founders are raising roughly $50M for Houseparty in a Sequoia-led round with Aleph, Comcast and Greylock returning.
First-order effects
- Existing Meerkat users lose the app entirely, and Life On Air's engineering and support resources consolidate behind Houseparty.
Second-order effects
- Twitter's Periscope is left as the default survivor of the 2015 livestreaming wave, having won not just users but the App Store featuring that Meerkat blamed for its decline.
- The Sequoia-led round validates the pivot for other consumer teams: abandoning a hyped-but-losing product can attract fresh capital rather than signal failure.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, consumer video splits into public broadcast (where Periscope-style scale wins) and private group chat (where Houseparty plays) — and investors fund focused pivots over multi-product companies.
The trend: Consumer live video is bifurcating from one-to-many public broadcasting into small-group private chat, with founders who pivot early rewarded by top-tier venture capital.